“We are not where we would like to be in terms of progress on the roadmap,” said Hanna S. Tetteh, who also heads the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) – a country that remains divided between two rival administrations. 

“Some Libyan actors continue to disregard the expectations of the public regarding their participation in political processes, or towards exercising political leadership based on democratic legitimacy,” she said. 

 “There are both national and regional risks to any continued inaction and foot dragging on the implementation of the roadmap and we believe it is important to recognize this now.” 

Dialogue on critical issues 

Ms. Tetteh updated ambassadors on the structured dialogue – the third pillar of the roadmap that she presented to the Council in August 2025. 

Discussions centre around four critical issues – security, governance, the economy, and national reconciliation and human rights – and taking in views from people across the country. 

She said that work in the four tracks has proceeded towards firm recommendations, and it is anticipated that the structured dialogue will conclude by early June with a final report that will be presented to political leaders and the public.  

“We envision these recommendations can help shape a national vision and inform critical policy reforms that are necessary to strengthen national institutions and create the conditions for the holding of peaceful national elections,” she said. 

UNSMIL continued engagement to advance the roadmap, including efforts to identify ways to unblock the current impasse, which she had reported on during her last statement to the Council two months ago. 

“However, if there is not sufficient progress, as indicated earlier, I will be returning to this Council to present a proposal to move the process forward based on the provisions of existing political agreements,” she said. 

Economic deterioration, poverty growing 

Ms. Tetteh also addressed the sharply deteriorating economic situation in Libya, marked by “currency pressures, rising prices, fuel shortages, uncontrolled and opaque public spending, and growing poverty.” 

These trends confirm that the current economic model and the practices supporting it are no longer sustainable. 

Furthermore, recent findings by a UN expert panel “help to explain the erosion of the State’s capacity to govern through unified, rules-based institutions,” she added. 

“Libya’s national wealth is being absorbed into a distorted political economy that fuels unaccountable spending and weaponises oil revenues,” Ms. Tetteh said. 

“This diversion of resources without a consensus on agreed national priorities weakens fiscal discipline and undermines the State’s ability to function as a steward for implementing projects, programmes and initiatives that respond to critical public priorities and social spending commitments.” 

She strongly urged Libya to implement the panel’s recommendations, particularly in relation to oversight and flows of revenue in the hydrocarbon sector. 

Security situation 

Ms. Tetteh noted that the security situation remains volatile, although no violations of a 2020 ceasefire were recorded. 

She said localised incidents, particularly in southern border areas, underscore the need for progress toward unifying the security and political institutions. 

Meanwhile, the situation in northwest coastal communities “remains volatile among armed groups and criminal networks vying for control over territory and creating space for illicit activities,” with clashes reported in four locations last month. 

On human rights, she cited continuing reports of arbitrary detention, intimidation, and reprisals by security actors against perceived political opponents, human rights defenders and public officials.  

Council support ‘essential’ 

“Libya has reached a significant political, economic, and security juncture. The institutions of the state remain divided, and there is not enough progress towards holding national elections,” Ms. Tetteh said. 

The UNSMIL roadmap “was conceived to help overcome the country’s de facto divisions through a negotiated governance arrangement leading to institutional reunification.” 

She told the Council that the mission will continue to work towards achieving the roadmap’s objectives “and once again your support towards these efforts is not just important; it is essential.” 

UN aid agencies are struggling to access provinces overrun by Rwanda-backed M23 rebel fighters at the start of the year, although dramatic funding shortfalls for humanitarian work have also contributed to the dire situation. Kigali has consistently denied providing military backing to the group.

Help could be provided more easily if air access were re-established, WFP insisted, as two airports in M23 areas “have been closed basically since the end of January…we’re urgently calling for a humanitarian air corridor, to be established”, said Cynthia Jones, WFP’s Country Director for DRC.

The alert follows the release of a report by UN-backed food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification platform (IPC), warning that nearly 25 million people are experiencing high levels of food insecurity, denoted as IPC3 on a scale of one to five, with five indicating famine.

This includes an alarming three million individuals who face “emergency” levels of hunger – IPC4 – a number that is “surging” and which is “almost double since last year”, said Ms. Jones.

“This means what for families? It means that they’re skipping their meals, depleting all of their household assets. They’re selling off their animals,” she said, speaking via video from Kinshasa to journalists in Geneva.

According to the UN agency, “people are already dying of hunger” in parts of eastern DR Congo.

Ms. Jones noted that fighting between M23 militiamen and DRC government forces is continuing, sparking new displacement and people “forced from their home over and over again”.

In eastern DR Congo, this has left about 5.2 million displaced people “including 1.6 million that have been displaced this year alone, making DRC one of the world’s largest displaced person crisis”, the WFP official added.

Despite deepening hunger, funding is running out for lifesaving humanitarian work and the UN agency has been forced to reduce the number of people it assists, from around once million at the start of the year, to 600,000 now.

“We will only be able to support a fraction of those in need” moving forward, Ms. Jones said, in an appeal for $350 million to support emergency food and nutrition assistance over the next six months. “Without it, we will have to make further cuts reduce [assistance] even further, down to 300,000 – which is only 10 per cent of the three million in need.”

Without a significant funding boost, the WFP warned of a “total pipeline break” in assistance by March 2026.

“That means a complete halt of all emergency food assistance in the eastern provinces.”

The dire funding shortfall has also impacted the agency internally, too. “We’re starting to close downtown offices, we’re reducing our footprint, the number of staff and juggling how to maintain the operational capacity to deliver in a very complex environment,” Ms. Jones explained.

And yet aid assistance remains vital for those displaced in eastern provinces including North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika because vital services have closed amid ongoing insecurity.

“The banks are closed, there’s no money available and this has just had a major impact on the population and on the humanitarian response,” Ms. Jones explained. “It has devastated livelihoods and really put the food security of affected people in dire, dire circumstances.”

As the conflict drags on, families seek shelter in urban centres such as Ituri, where host communities are already struggling to cope. Equally worrying is the fact that millions of subsistence farmers forced from their homes or too fearful to access their land have missed the planting season this year.

“The women, children, men, they’ve just been suffering devastating sequences of the violence, perpetrated by the non-state armed groups and fleeing from conflict. They’re tired, exhausted and need peace,” Ms. Jones insisted.

Donald Trump’s framework agreement for ending the Gaza war and reconstructing the devastated territory has momentum behind it.

Much of it comes from the president himself. Momentum comes too from leading Arab and Islamic countries who have supported the plan, including Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey. And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to Donald Trump, accepted it too, despite the fact it contains talk of a pathway to a Palestinian state that he has repeatedly denounced.

To keep the pace up, Trump says that Hamas has “three to four days” to decide whether to say yes or no.

If the answer is no, the war goes on.

The proposed deal looks a lot like a plan put forward by Joe Biden well over a year ago. Since then there has been massive killing of Palestinian civilians, more destruction in Gaza, and now a famine, while Israeli hostages in Gaza have had to endure months more of agony and captivity.

There were many reports in the Israeli media that the Biden initiative failed because Netanyahu moved the goalposts with a new set of demands – under pressure from the hard right in his cabinet.

Even so, the framework plan is a significant moment. For the first time, Donald Trump is putting pressure on Israel to end the war. Donald Trump has made himself into a leader to whom it is hard to say no. Nobody wants to end up getting the roasting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky received in the Oval Office back in February. But things can change when leaders leave the White House.

Before Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington DC to go back to Israel his staff filmed him putting over his version of events. One element was the idea of an independent Palestine next to Israel, the two-state solution which the UK and other Western countries have tried to revive by recognising Palestine.

The Trump document gives an indeterminate nod to the idea of Palestinian independence. It says that after the reform of the Palestinian Authority, which is based in Ramallah and led by President Mahmoud Abbas, conditions “may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

Even the thought of a distant prospect of a Palestinian state was too much for Netanyahu, who had given whole-hearted support to Trump at the White House, telling him in English “I support your plan to end the war in Gaza, which achieves our war aims.”

On the video, getting his message out in Hebrew to the people back home before the long flight home, Netanyahu is asked if he agreed to a Palestinian state. He was emphatic.

“No, absolutely not. It’s not even written in the agreement. But we did say one thing. That we would forcibly resist a Palestinian state.” Trump, he said, agreed.

Momentum is the plan’s strength. Its weakness is the lack of detail, a characteristic of Trumpian diplomacy. The document that Trump and Netanyahu endorsed, which also has the support of the UK and other European countries, comes with a rough map of stages of an IDF pull-back, but none of the nuts and bolts that determine whether diplomatic agreements designed to end a war hold together or disintegrate.

If it is to work, hard negotiation will be necessary. In that process there will be many opportunities for it to break down.

Mainstream opposition parties in Israel have endorsed the plan. It has been condemned by the extremist ultra-nationalists in the Netanyahu coalition, who had loved the “Trump Riviera” plan mooted at the start of the year, launched with a bizarre video showing the leaders of Israel and the US in beach gear sipping cocktails to the backdrop of a new Gazan cityscape glittering glass towers. The Israeli hard right were delighted that the Riviera plan included the removal of all of Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians. Jewish extremists want the land annexed and Palestinians replaced with Jewish settlers.

But the new plan says no Palestinian will be forced to leave. Benjamin Netanyahu’s key far right ally, Itamar Ben Gvir, is said to have called the proposal “dangerous” and “full of holes”.

If Hamas accepts the agreement, and if Benjamin Netanyahu wants to find ways to placate the extremists who keep his coalition in power, he will have plenty of chances to sabotage the negotiations in ways that put the blame on Hamas. The structure of the Trump framework agreement allows Israel a range of opportunities to veto moves it does not like.

It may not be possible to end a deep-seated conflict that has lasted more than a century. Longer term, the UK and many countries outside Israel and the US believe that any attempted solution that does not lead to Palestinian independence will not bring peace.

When the foreign ministers of the Arab and Islamic countries issued their statement of support, they said that they believed it would lead to a full Israeli withdrawal and rebuilding of Gaza, and “a path for just peace on basis of two-state solution under which Gaza is fully integrated with the West Bank in Palestinian state in accordance with international law.” That could be taken as a coded reference to the decision of the International Court of Justice that the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel is illegal.

Netanyahu believes the deal takes him closer to Israel’s elusive victory over Hamas. He denies any Palestinian right to the land between the river Jordan and the sea.

One plan, two very different versions of what it means. The framework is ambiguous enough for both interpretations to be possible. That is not a promising start.

BBC

Elissa Novak

‘Signs missed’

Elissa Novak

Tips for parents and carers

All week across the BBC we’ve been hearing from people in Gaza about their lives as food supplies are restricted leading to malnourishment and starvation.

The BBC is not allowed to report from inside Gaza – because the Israeli government won’t allow us – so we rely on trusted freelancers to provide us with material. But this week news organisations – including the BBC – warned that the lack of food means those freelancers are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.

The Israeli government, which controls the entry of all supplies into Gaza, says starvation is not its fault and blames Hamas for stealing food. Most international aid organisations say it is Israel that is failing the population. As the occupying power under international law Israel has a legal responsibility to protect the population from hunger and starvation.

We’ve collated the stories of some of those who have spoken to us and images from the week – this report contains images of malnourished children.

All week across the BBC we’ve been hearing from people in Gaza about their lives as food supplies are restricted leading to malnourishment and starvation.

The BBC is not allowed to report from inside Gaza – because the Israeli government won’t allow us – so we rely on trusted freelancers to provide us with material. But this week news organisations – including the BBC – warned that the lack of food means those freelancers are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.

The Israeli government, which controls the entry of all supplies into Gaza, says starvation is not its fault and blames Hamas for stealing food. Most international aid organisations say it is Israel that is failing the population. As the occupying power under international law Israel has a legal responsibility to protect the population from hunger and starvation.

We’ve collated the stories of some of those who have spoken to us and images from the week – this report contains images of malnourished children.

Dr Mark Perlmutter

Reuters

Supplied

Julie Tipping told BBC News NI she had been fighting to get more help and support for her 11-year-old son, Theo.

“I love him with all my heart but it’s so hard to watch,” she said.

“He’s quite a big boy, but when he’s really distressed like that and lashing out, it’s sore.

“He can really hurt you, not meaning to, of course, and there is a real fear about where this is going.”

Responsibility for Theo’s care falls to the Belfast Health Trust.

In a statement, a spokesperson says it is very sorry that it is unable to offer overnight breaks, but that the trust is currently exploring ways of reintroducing them.

It added that it does all it can to provide support for autistic children.